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THE VIRGIN BIRTH 


THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
NEW YORK - BOSTON + CHICAGO - DALLAS 
ATLANTA * SAN FRANCISCO 


MACMILLAN & CO., Liwi1tEep 
LONDON - BOMBAY + CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 


THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Lr. 


TORONTO 


THE VIRGIN BIRTH 


BY 


FREDERIC PALMER, D.D. 
HARVARD UNIVERSITY 


jew Bork 
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1924 


All rights reserved 


CopyRIGHT, 1924, 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 





Set up and printed. 
Published January, 1924 


Printed in the United States of America by 
J. J. LITTLE AND IVES COMPANY, NEW YORK 


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CONTENTS 


CHAPTER 


I, 
II. 
1b & 
EV. 


THE BreLticaL EvIpENCE 


THE GRowTH OF THE DOCTRINE 


MIRACLES . 


THE VircIN BirTH AND THE CREEDS . 


PAGE 


17 
92 
45 


Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2021 with funding from 
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign 


https://archive.org/details/virginbirthOOpalm 


THE VIRGIN BIRTH 





THE VIRGIN BIRTH 


CHAPTER I 


THE BIBLICAL EVIDENCE 


Perhaps no part of the story of Jesus has 
appealed to the heart of humanity with a more 
tender touch than the gospel of the Infancy. The 
Mother and the Babe have been the centre 
of Christian art and have interpreted the reality 
of the Incarnation and the sacredness of all child- 
hood. It may seem, at first, that any change 
in our view of the traditional facts must involve 
serious loss; that if the Virgin Birth should 
prove to be unhistorical, much of the precious- 
ness of the gospel story would be gone. 

In the face of such an apprehension, however, 
it is assuring to note how little the mode of 
Jesus’ birth has, in fact, to do with the rest of 
the early history—Bethlehem and the manger, 
the angels, the Magi, the Temple. ‘These are 
not affected but remain the same on any theory 
we may adopt as to the mode of his birth. And 
indeed if we may believe that his birth, like the 

I 


2 The Virgin Birth 


rest of his life, was subject to the common condi- 
tions of humanity, there opens before us a larger 
and more comforting view of his person, a bond 
of closer intimacy with him, a means of salva- 
tion, more precious and potent than were possible 
before. Whatever conclusion, therefore, our in- 
vestigation may reach, we need not fear that it 
will prove more meagre in spiritual sustenance or 
less enkindling for devotion. 

Our earliest Gospel, that of St. Mark, dating 
probably about 70 A.D., makes no mention of the 
Virgin Birth. According to it “the beginning of 
the gospel of Jesus Christ the Son of God” was 
the preaching of John the Baptist.t In the middle 
of the second century we find the Virgin Birth 
fully established as a doctrine of the Christian 
Church, though apparently not long established; 
for Justin Martyr replies to the charge that it 
is an innovation by comparing it with similar 
ideas long prevalent in the heathen world as to the 
origin of the so-called sons of Zeus.* Between 
these two dates (70 A.D. and 150 A.D.) there- 
fore, it seems to have gained recognition; though 
Justin declares there are still- some Christians 
who do not hold it, of whom, however, he is 
not one. If we are wise, we shall not declare 
that the two passages of the Gospels in which 
alone it is mentioned settle the matter regardless 


*St. Mark, 1, 1. 
? Apol. 1, 21. 


The Biblical Evidence 3 


of other evidence, nor shall we attempt un- 
scientifically to prove a negative and maintain 
that birth from a virgin is absolutely impossible. 
Instead, we shall weigh patiently the conflicting 
evidence in the New Testament and form our 
opinion according to its weight. 

There are two different views of the birth of 
Jesus, each with difficulties of its own. ‘The one 
—that he had no human father—is confronted 
by the strong presumption to a modern mind 
against the occurrence of such an event; more- 
over, taking the story as it stands, it must be 
explained why the first generation of Christians 
either did not know of it or maintained strict 
silence on the subject, so far as we are aware, 
until near the end of the first century, and then re- 
ferred to it in only two passages of the Christian 
documents. The other view—that he had a 
human father, and that the belief in the Virgin 
Birth arose from exigencies in the thought of 
the time—has to meet the difficulty that historic 
evidence exhibiting the growth of such a belief 
is lacking. 

Each of these two views finds support in the 
New Testament. The Virgin Birth is directly 
asserted in one passage and perhaps asserted or 
implied in another. There is no question that, 
according to most manuscript texts, it is directly 
asserted in St. Matt. 1,18-25: 


4 The Virgin Birth 


“Now the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise: When 
as his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they 
came together, she was found with child of the Holy 
Ghost. ‘Then Joseph her husband, being a just man, and 
not willing to make her a public example, was minded to 
put her away privily. But while he thought on these things, 
behold, the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a dream, 
saying, Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee 
Mary thy wife; for that which is conceived in her is of the 
Holy Ghost. And she shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt 
call his name JESUS; for he shall save his people from their 
sins. Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which 
was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, Behold, a 
virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and 
they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted 
is, God with us. Then Joseph being raised from sleep did 
as the angel of the Lord had bidden him, and took unto him 
his wife; And knew her not till she had brought forth her 
first-born son; and he called his name JESUS.” 


The Sinai-Syriac MS., dating) from the be- 
ginning of the fifth century, gives 1,16 as follows: 
‘Joseph, to whom was betrothed Mary the vir- 
gin, begat Jesus, who is called the Christ’; and 
it adds to the Received Text in 1,21 two words, 
‘she shall bear to thee a son,” and again in 1,25, 
‘‘she bore to him a son.” ‘The wording of the 
reference to Mary in this passage makes it plain 
that a belief in the Virgin Birth was already estab- 
lished at the time it was written, and established 
so firmly that its author could refer to her by her 
well-known title for identification, though, as he 
has just said, it was not actually descriptive of 
her state. In the passage quoted (Isa. 7,14), 
the Hebrew word here rendered ‘‘virgin’’ means 


The Biblical Evidence 5 


more accurately a marriageable young woman 
without regard to her condition. The passage is 
quoted by the author of the Gospel not as a 
prophecy of the Virgin Birth, but of the giving 
to the child Jesus a name expressive of his divine 
function. The Jews never regarded this passage 
in Isaiah as Messianic. 

The second reference ® is less clear. An angel 
announces to Mary that she shall become the 
mother of a child called Jesus. She questions this 
prediction in the absence of sexual intercourse, 
apparently assuming that it is expected to take 
place at once. But the angel answers, ‘“The Holy 
Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of 
the Highest shall overshadow thee; therefore also 
that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall 
be called a son of God.” Nothing here directly 
excludes human paternity; and there are those 
who maintain it is consistent with such paternity 
on the ground that it might be said of any child, 
since every child is a child of God. It may be 
questioned, however, whether that is not a 
thought too modern for the occasion, one which 
would not be brought forward except to explain 
away a conclusion regarded as undesirable. It 
seems more probable that the author of these 
words considered them to imply a divine and not 
a human parentage. 

These are the only passages in the New Testa- 

*St. Luke 1, 26-36. 


6 The Virgin Birth 


ment in which virgin birth is asserted or so much 
as hinted at. On the other hand, many passages 
assert or imply the opposite view. Mary, the 
person who should have known most about the 
matter, calls Joseph his father: “Thy father 
and I have sought thee sorrowing.’’* ‘The ex- 
planation has been offered that she is here adopt- 
ing the common usage of her Nazareth towns- 
people without reference to the actual fact. But 
there is no indication that such is the case, and 
it is difficult to believe that such an explanation 
would have been advanced except to buttress a 
pre-established theory. The author of the third 
Gospel, on whose careful research in regard to 
the story of the infancy much emphasis has been 
laid, apparently adopted Mary’s view, for he 
calls Joseph and Mary the “‘parents”’ of Jesus; > 
and in one instance,® immediately after using 
‘‘narents,”’ he speaks of ‘Joseph and his mother,” 
as if he regarded the two phrases as equivalent. 
This latter may, however, have been part of the 
growing movement in Christian circles to avoid 
speaking of Joseph as Jesus’ father, before the 
substitution had become more thoroughgoing. 
The earlier texts show no objection to the use of 
“narents,” while the later texts substitute other 
expressions. Thus while St. Luke 2;33 reads, in 


*St. Luke 2, 48. 
°Tbid. 27-41. 
® Ibid. 43. 


The Biblical Evidence 7 


the earlier manuscript text: “his father and 
mother,” the later manuscript text has “Joseph 
and his mother.” * 

The opinion of the community in regard to the 
paternity of Jesus is not conclusive but it must 
carry weight. He is held to be the son of Joseph, 
the well-known carpenter. This view Jesus him- 
self, according to the fourth Gospel, apparently 
endorses. For when his opponents object that 
he cannot be the Christ because they know his 
antecedents—his birth-place and parentage— 
whereas the Christ will appear no one knows from 
whence, he accepts their statements in regard to 
his antecedents as correct, but declares it to be 
no bar to his Messiahship. ‘ ‘We know this man,’ 
they afirm, ‘whence he is, but when the Christ 
cometh, no man knoweth whence he is.’ Then 
said Jesus in the Temple as he taught, ‘Ye do in- 
deed know me and ye know whence I am,’”’ and 
then he goes on to point out a higher authoriza- 
tion for Messiahship than genealogical descent. 
Again, if Jesus had known of the Virgin Birth, he 
would not have been likely to refer to his mother’s 
family and their home as his own kin and his own 
house;® and if Mary had known of his super- 


"Cf. Westcott and Hort, and the Sinai-Syriac MS. Cf. an im- 
portant discussion of early readings in Hastings’ Bible Diction- 
ary, Vol. II, pp. 644-645. Also Notes on Select Readings in 
eer and Hort’s, The New Testament in the Original 

reek. 

*St. Matt. 13, 55. St. John 1, 45; 6, 42. St. Luke 4, 22. 

°St. Mark 6, 4. pea 4s 


8 The Virgin Birth 


natural origin, it would have restrained her from 
joining his other friends, as she ‘apparently did, 
on the occasion when they declared that he had 
gone mad.?° Moreover, if any least hint of his 
virgin birth had ever come to their ears, the 
friends of Jesus would have been swift to ad- 
vance it in support of their claim to an exalted 
position for their Master, while his enemies 
would at once have hastened to found on it a 
charge of scandal and shame. 

Another significant item of evidence is the sur- 
prise Joseph and Mary showed at the announce- 
ment of the shepherds and at the outspoken 
blessing of Simeon.*! ‘The inference is plain that 
if they had so recently become aware of the 
uniqueness of their child, they could hardly have 
wondered at the homage paid him. Again, they 
are surprised and without understanding, when 
they find him at twelve years of age in the Tem- 
ple, and he tells them that of course he must be 
about his father’s business. Such surprise is only 
intelligible when we hear them saying to each 
other, “But his father is a carpenter!” 

On the eighth day after the birth of Jesus he 
is taken to the Temple for circumcision and for 
the purification of his mother. But on the theory 
of the Virgin Birth there had been no legal un- 
cleanness, and thus no ground for purification. 


* St. Mark, 3, 31.21. 
™ St. Luke 1, 18-33. 


The Biblical Evidence 9 


Moreover, the narrator says it was “their” puri- 
fication, though the Revised Version has changed 
the pronoun to “her” to accord with what was 
supposed to be proper.’? In point of fact the 
Revisers were right and the narrator was mis- 
taken in supposing that the father and the child 
were included in the ceremony, for according to 
the Levitical law it was the mother only who was 
unclean.?2 But his use of ‘‘their’”’ indicates that, 
in the thought of the narrator, all who were con- 
cerned in the birth must be purified, and there- 
fore Joseph as father must be included. 

In order to legitimate any claim for Jesus to 
the title of Messiah it was necessary to show that 
he was a descendant from David, for all Jewish 
authorities were agreed that the Messiah could 
come of David’s line only. The Christian advo- 
cates of Jesus’ Messiahship therefore presented 
two genealogies to prove his Davidic descent.'+ 
These genealogies are based on a fanciful ar- 
rangement of generations and are in many re- 
spects different from each other. But they both 
agree in ending the chain of descent with Joseph. 
They would therefore have been useless if Joseph 
had not been in reality his father. The author 
or editor of the third Gospel has heard of the 
Virgin Birth, and while inclining to allow it, still 


“St. Luke 2, 22. 
“Lévy. 12, 2. 
“St. Matt. 1, 1-17; St. Luke 3, 23. 


IO The Virgin Birth 


cannot bring himself to forego the advantage of 
a claim to Davidic descent which, however, could 
only be valid on the contrary supposition. He 
therefore inserts a clause of possible qualifica- 
tion, ‘‘as was supposed.” But unless the 
supposition was correct, his genealogy was worth- 
less. The endeavor not so much to examine 
what a passage says as to make it say what we 
think it ought to mean led the pious Annius of 
Viterbo at the close of the fifteenth century to 
suggest that this was not a genealogy of Joseph 
but of Mary. But this device must be rejected, 
first because there is no evidence that the Jews 
recognized the genealogies of women as con- 
stituting a legal right for their sons; and then 
because it would do the strongest violence also 
to the language of the passage, since it would 
require the meaning, being, as was supposed, 
the son of Joseph, but in reality the son of Mary, 
who was the daughter of Heli, who was the son 
of Matthat. It is probable, indeed, that Mary 
was not of the tribe of Judah, David's tribe, for 
she is said to have been a cousin or kinswoman 
of Elizabeth, who was of the tribe of Levi." 
This view of Mary’s descent finds confirmation 
in ““The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs,”’ 
a book dating probably not later than 135 A.D. 
Here the Messiah is said to be of the tribe of 
Levi, and again of the two tribes of Levi and 
* Levi XV, iii, Sinker’s Ed., p. 104. 


The Biblical Evidence II 


Judah, as typical of his twofold office of priest 
and king. The Epistle to the Hebrews re- 
asserts that Jesus was of the tribe of Judah."” 
The author then goes on to point out the exalted 
position of Jesus, and this he does by declaring 
that his functions were like those of a half-myth- 
ical king of ancient Hebrew history, Melchize- 
dek. But how much stronger would have been 
his demonstration if he had declared that the 
Holy Spirit was the immediate father of Jesus! 
Yet such a claim, superior as it would have been, 
he never mentions. He does assert that the ex- 
alted position of Jesus as the ideal priest in bring- 
ing men to God was not a matter of birth; he was 
“without father, without mother, without de- 
scent.’ He did not belong to an institutional 
order. His function was personal and individual, 
“having neither beginning of days nor end of 
life.” This line of argument he would not have 
been likely to take if he had known of the Virgin 
Birth. 

Another suggestion made to reconcile these 
genealogies with the Virgin Birth is that the 
genealogy of the husband may have been reck- 
oned as that of the wife. But for this there is 
no shade of evidence, and it is directly disproved 
by the painful reform carried out under Ezra, 
in which Jews who had married foreigners were 


6 Heb. 7, 17; Rev. 1, 5. 
Heb. 7, 14. 


12 The Virgin Birth 


compelled to divorce their wives and put away 
their children by them to prevent contamination 
of the holy race.18 It is difficult to avoid the 
conclusion that to the compilers of these geneal- 
ogies it was a matter of prime importance that 
Jesus should be by lineal descent a son of David 
and Abraham, and that his title to this could 
come only through Joseph. If Mary was of the 
tribe of Levi and if the birth of Jesus was not a 
natural one, he was not descended from David. 
The Epistles of St. Paul, which are earlier in 
date than any of our Gospels, contain no mention 
of the Virgin Birth. St. Paul is of the same 
opinion as the genealogies of the Gospels, that 
Jesus was ‘“‘made of the seed of David according 
to the flesh”; 1® and this is repeated in a later 
letter ascribed to him,” and again in the Epistle 
to the Hebrews.”! St. Paul says, ‘‘God sent forth 
His Son, made of a woman, made under the 
law, to redeem them that were under the law.” 22 
The thought here is that a redeemer must be 
subject to like conditions with those whom he 
would redeem; he must be, as the apostle declares 
elsewhere, ‘“‘the first-born among many breth- 
ren.’ *8 ‘This thought he repeats in saying that 


*Ezra 9 and 1o. 
* Rom. 1, 3. 

II Tim. 2, 8. 

= Heb. 7, 14. 

* Gal. 4, 4. 

» Rom. 8, 29. 


The Biblical Evidence 13 


God sent His own Son “‘in the likeness of sinful 
flesh”; 24 an expression impossible of use by any- 
one who regarded the Holy Spirit as the imme- 
diate father of Jesus. Our earliest Gospel says 
that at Jesus’ baptism he saw heaven opened and 
the Holy Spirit descending upon him and heard 
a voice saying to him, ‘“Thou art my beloved Son, 
in whom I am well pleased.” If this was the 
occasion when he became conscious of himself 
as in a special sense the son of God—and this 
seems indicated by the temptation which imme- 
diately followed—then he could have had no con- 
sciousness previously of a sonship conferred upon 
him by an exceptional method of birth, for these 
two ideas of sonship are opposed to each other. 
The latter is materialistic, implying that special 
sonship to God is conveyed by a physical process. 
In the thought of the former sonship is spiritual, 
consisting in likeness to God in character and not 
in a physical quality of blood. This other matert- 
alistic view of the divine element in Jesus effec- 
tually disqualifies him to be the Saviour of men; 
for that salvation depends, as St. Paul says, upon 
his being made of a woman, the first-born among 
many brethren, or, as the Epistle to the Hebrews 
has it, one who is touched with the feeling of 
our infirmities, being ‘“‘in all points tempted like 
as we are, yet without sin.” 2° But if a special 


* Rom. 8, 3. 
* Heb. 4, 15. 


14 The Virgin Birth 


nature conveyed through a special method of gen- 
eration rendered him immune to temptation, then 
every suffering human being might exclaim, “No 
comfort nor uplift for me can come from him; 
his nature shut him out from the conditions under 
which I live. His goodness was conveyed to him 
from without, but mine is not so conveyed to me. 
I must fight my battle, therefore, apart from him 
and alone.’”’ ‘The doctrine of the Virgin Birth 
does thus in fact reduce Jesus to the status of 
an Arabian genie or a Greek demi-god, a being 
whom we can contemplate with wonder but with 
whom we can have no essential connection. But 
the whole soteriology of the New Testament rests 
upon the idea of the conquest of temptation, not 
its avoidance through an impossibility of yield- 
ing, due to a peculiar inheritance. This the author 
of the Epistle to the Hebrews emphasizes: ‘‘He 
that sanctifieth and they who are sanctified are 
all of one; for which cause he is not ashamed to 
call them brethren. . . . Forasmuch then as the 
childen are partakers of flesh and blood, he also 
himself likewise took part of the same, that 
through death he might destroy him that had 
the power of death . . . For verily he took not 
on him the nature of angels, but he took on him 
the seed of Abraham. Wherefore in all things it 
behooved him to be madé like unto his breth- 
ren... For in that he himself hath suffered, 
being tempted, he is able to succour them that are 


The Biblical Evidence 15 


tempted.” 2° Could there be a clearer statement 
of the essential oneness of Jesus with humanity? 

To sum up our discussion thus far, we may 
say that there are two views in regard to the birth 
of Jesus, for each of which exegetical support may 
be found in the New Testament. One is 
that he had no human father but was born with- 
out human generation, his mother remaining after 
his birth as before, a virgin. ‘This view is clearly 
asserted in one passage and perhaps asserted, 
probably at least implied, in another. These are 
the only references to this view in the Bible. One 
who holds it may therefore claim so much and 
no more Scriptural authority for his opinion. The 
other view is that Joseph was his father. This 
is directly asserted in one passage in the Author- 
ized Version and in several of the early texts, 
and is implied in many passages of the New Testa- 
ment. One who holds this view may therefore 
claim for it more extensive Scriptural authority. 
This is not the place to inquire whether the Greek 
manuscript text supporting both these views is a 
faithful transcript of the original document or 
whether changes by later editors are discoverable 
in it. That important question must be left for 
textual scholars to consider. It is sufficient for our 
purpose to recognize that both views find some 
support in early tradition, though it does not fol- 
low that the evidence is equally strong in both 

E dieb, 2; \11 ff. 


16 The Virgin Birth 


cases. The evidence on each side must be fairly 
weighed. It is, however, surprising that the in- 
congruousness with their surroundings of the two 
passages supporting the former view should not 
have been more fully perceived by the authors or 
editors of our text, but that these two passages 
should be left almost isolated, like glacial boulders 
standing alone on a lowland plain. 

If the objection is raised that we have been 
giving here too much consideration to the reason- 
ableness of the situation, it may be well to refer 
the objector to the words of the judicious Richard 
Hooker: ‘Inasmuch as law doth stand upon 
reason, to allege reason serveth as well as to cite 
Scripture.’’ 27 

Eccles. Polity, Bk. II, Ch. V, p. 7. 


CHAPTER II 


THE GROWTH OF THE DOCTRINE 


Though there is no contemporary evidence 
illustrating the steps by which the belief in the 
Virgin Birth attained its full growth, several ten- 
dencies of thought in the first two centuries may 
help to explain it. Justin refers to the fact that 
the supernatural birth of divinities was a common 
idea in the heathen world. Though it may appear 
strange to us that an advocate of the superiority 
of Christianity should think that this had any ap- 
plication to the case of Jesus, it would have seemed 
entirely natural to the Greek-speaking Christians 
of Asia that their religion should not lack this 
mark of authority which the religions about them 
possessed. ‘That birth is possible by other means 
than ordinary generation was a very ancient be- 
lief, of which there are still survivals. Because it 
would be unscientific to attempt to prove a nega- 
tive, all we can say is that such a birth may 
not be impossible. Just because, however, it 
was not the ordinary mode of human birth it 
would have seemed to ancient thought appro- 
priate and necessary to a divine being; a remark- 

17 


18 The Virgin Birth 


able being must have a remarkable origin. An- 
other early belief, which came to be developed 
by Manes in the third century, declared that mat- 
ter was essentially evil and therefore opposed to 
spirit. The world was consequently a dualism, 
a perpetual conflict between the material and the 
spiritual. ‘This dualism largely influenced the 
Christian thought of the early centuries, though 
it was opposed by much of the Pauline theology 
and by the Johannine theology also. Through all 
the ages since, however, it has harmfully ravaged 
the popular conceptions of the relations of man 
and God—this idea that the human is the non- 
divine and the divine, the non-human. The more 
different then from the ordinary course of hu- 
manity anything is, the more likely, in this view, 
is it to be representative of the divine. This ten- 
dency would lead to easy acceptance of the super- 
normal element in the life of Jesus. Everything 
about him must be of the highest. His origin 
therefore must be free from all taint. Since the 
ordinary method of human generation was, in 
this view, unclean, demanding purification, his 
birth must have had no human father. 

This demand would be strengthened by the 
growing conviction of his divine nature. Be- 
tween the awed exclamation of Thomas, ‘My 
Lord and my God!” and the decree of Nicza, 
there stretched three centuries of meditation on 
the nature of Christ, characterized by an award 


The Growth of the Doctrine 1g 


to him of more and more attributes belonging 
to the essential nature of God. ‘The attributes 
selected varied with the problems forced upon 
the thought of different times, and the different 
attributions, as might be expected, under these cir- 
cumstances, were not always consistent with one 
another. St. Paul, who credited Jesus with pre- 
existence and regarded him as the embodiment of 
the eternal Son of God, would be likely to regard 
the story of the Virgin Birth as insignificant or 
suspicious; and for one who saw in him the Di- 
vine Logos an assertion of the Virgin Birth 
would be impossible. That which came to be ac- 
cepted as the rounded-out Christian conception 
of Christ underwent a slow development, and this 
speaks for its genuineness. It would be strange if 
in the early stages of this development a mode 
of birth different from that of other beings had 
not been assigned to him. For as the idea 
gained ground that Jesus was the Son of God, it 
would become increasingly difficult to postpone to 
his baptism, in his thirtieth year, as does the sec- 
ond Gospel, his adoption as Son; he must have 
been God’s chosen instrument from his birth, and 
therefore must have been plainly marked as such. 

Still another influence tending to establish or 
strengthen the belief in a virgin birth was the 
growth of asceticism in early Christian society, 
with its conviction of the superiority of virginity 
to marriage. We see this depreciation of mar- 


20 The Virgin Birth 


riage already in the New Testament, as when 
St. Paul compares a wife and a virgin to the dis- 
advantage of the former, and maintains that a 
father who gives his daughter in marriage does 
well, but one who gives her not does better. In 
his view, while marriage is entirely permissible to 
the Christian, abstention from marriage is more 
desirable.1 That some upheld celibacy as the 
superior estate appears in the denunciation of 
them by a mid-century author. ‘There are those, 
he says, who depart from the faith, “forbidding 
to marry,’ and he expressly directs the young 
women to marry and bring up children.? Again, 
praise, in the Vision of the Seer, is the lot of the 
144,000 redeemed, who are men and virgins.’ 
The tide of asceticism had not yet come to the 
full where it decreed celibacy essential to holli- 
ness, but the movement towards it was on the 
way. Now where marriage was so strongly felt 
to involve a taint or at least a status lower than 
the highest, the pious Christian would inevitably 
seek to remove the thought of such a taint from 
all connection with the Founder of his religion. 
Because everything else about Jesus was holy, his 
birth must have been holy, and therefore without 
human generation. 

There are many persons who before they can 


a Cor i7; 26H. 
OL Tim, 4°35) the 
* Rev. 14, 4. 


The Growth of the Doctrine 21 


bring themselves to consider the evidence in re- 
gard to the Virgin Birth, are perplexed by a pre- 
vious question: How is it possible for the Bible 
to contain statements in conflict with one another? 
They “have been accustomed to regard the Bible 
as one book presenting one outlook, one consist- 
ent system of doctrine, from beginning to end. 
Even when this has been superseded by the later 
view of the Bible as a literature, the conviction 
persists that all its parts bear witness to an under- 
lying unity. And such is indeed the case. But 
the unity is not one of opinion or knowledge or 
outlook either upon the world or upon the con- 
ception of God. It is rather one of spiritual 
attitude, of upward look and reach, of increas- 
ing penetration into the depths of religious 
thought and loyalty to convictions attained. The 
ideas underlying these convictions may vary 
widely and antagonistically. For example, in 
the Jewish State, usury was forbidden; yet in the 
parable of the Householder and his Servants 
the servant is denounced as wicked for not having 
repaid his master with usury.* The primitive con- 
ception of the meeting-place of God with men 
was a garden; then a movable tent; then a gor- 
geous temple; while in the last book of the Bible 
it is a city, and this contains no temple, for the 
tabernacle of God is with men.® Jesus is con- 


*Cf. Lev. 25, 37; Ps. 15, 5; St. Luke 19, 23. 
* Gen. 2, 8; Exod. 25, 9; I Kings 6, 1; Rev. 21, 3. 


22 The Virgin Birth 


tinually insisting on the changes which the law 
of development brings: “Ye have heard that it 
was said by them of old time. . . . But I say unto 
you.” ® Yet he is equally insistent in declaring 
that these changes are but such as are necessary 
to unite present practice with past precept and 
to reveal their underlying unity.’ 

The unity of the Bible is therefore in no way 
disturbed by varying or conflicting statements. In 
fact it would be an inaccurate and untrustworthy 
record of the relations of men and God in history 
if many of the earlier stages it narrates were not 
superseded by further and higher developments. 
We may consequently consider the conflicting 
evidence in regard to the Virgin Birth without 
feeling that we are in any way disloyal to our rey- 
erence for the Bible in recognizing in it divergent 
statements. St. Paul had apparently never heard 
of the Virgin Birth, for he is wholly silent in re- 
gard to it and his Christology has a totally dif- 
ferent basis. What convinces him that Jesus is 
the Son of God is not any incident connected with 
his birth but his personal power, his holiness and 
his superiority to death. If St. Paul did not 
regard the Virgin Birth as essential in Christian- 
ity, we need not so regard it. It is superfluous 
for us to be more orthodox than he. 


*St. Matt. 5, 21-22. 
" [bid., 5, 17-18. 
* Rom. 1, 4. 


The Growth of the Doctrine 23 


We hold today to a sharp distinction between 
matter and spirit; but for the early Christian cen- 
turies this distinction did not exist. Spirit was a 
sublimated form of matter, the two passing into 
each other. Modern science is apparently tend- 
ing in this direction again. ‘The end towards 
which it is progressing seems to be the abolition 
of the distinction between mind and matter and 
the recognition of all matter as a form of force 
and force as a form of mind. Should this view 
become reasonably well established, we shall find 
ourselves living in what is literally a universe. 
The thought of the first century, therefore, saw no 
obstacle in the way of regarding the divinity of 
Christ as material, a substance implanted by non- 
human agency in the womb of the Virgin Mary. 
It was this non-human essence which made him 
sui generis different from other beings, a state 
which no other being could ever attain. 

That is still to many persons today the basis 
of their conception of the divinity of Christ, a 
physical something implanted in him before birth 
which rendered him forever different from all 
other beings. And this much can be said for. this 
view, that native endowment, that which differ- 
entiates one man from another, is ever a mystery. 
How far physical elements mingle with spiritual 
no one can tell. But that the physical is the de- 
termining, the characteristic element in person- 
ality, we cannot today believe. We must think 


24 The Virgin Birth 


that the will is the centre of personality, and that 
this rather than any material substance constitutes 
the person. We must regard the divinity of Christ 
therefore as consisting primarily in the unity of 
his will with the will of God. It was this which 
was the centre of his being; it was the com- 
pleteness of this unity which constituted him 
unique, the fact that he could always and every- 
where say, “Thy will be done.” Such a sharing 
of the Divine will would give him access to others 
of the Divine powers; and we find him therefore 
possessed of knowledge of human character, of 
control over the minds and bodies of men and 
over natural forces, which so far transcend the 
powers of others that we sometimes calls them 
supernatural. But all these fell into the line 
of the development of personality around its 
centre, the will. Just as in the lower orders of 
creation the line between organic and inorganic 
is obscure, so the line between human and divine 
is dificult to draw; the one shades into the other. 
The human element in man shades into his divine 
element, and the divine in man shades into the 
divine in Christ, and the divinity of Christ shades 
into the divinity of God. 

That there is thus a line running straight from 
man through Christ up to God is the master-key 
that unlocks the Christology of the New Testa- 
ment. It contains, indeed, several systems of 
Christology, if we may use the word ‘‘system” 


The Growth of the Doctrine 25) 


where no one is developed with systematic exact- 
ness. The main objective, for example, of the 
Pauline theology can be reached along this line. 
It was necessary that one qualified to ‘condemn 
sin in the flesh”? should be made “‘in the likeness 
of sinful flesh.” ® In order that those who were 
under the law might be redeemed, ‘“‘God sent forth 
his Son, made of a woman, made under the 
law.” 1° He is the “first-born among many 
brethren,” "1 which could not be unless there were 
a nature common to both him and them. And this 
is emphasized more explicitly: ‘‘He that sancti- 
fieth and they who are sanctified are all of one; 
for which cause he is not ashamed to call them 
brethren.” 72, Consequently he is ‘‘touched with 
the feeling of our infirmities,” since he ‘‘was in all 
points tempted like as we are, yet without sin.’ 18 
It was a stage in the great line of spiritual evolu- 
tion for God “‘in bringing many sons unto glory, 
to make the Captain of their salvation perfect 
through sufferings.” 14 

It is but putting in different form the thought 
of the essential oneness of mind and matter to 
point out that modern science has abolished the 
distinction between differences of degree and of 


26 The Virgin Birth 


kind. Heretofore a butterfly’s wing was regarded 
as different in kind from a grain of sand; the 
two had nothing in common. But the butterfly’s 
wing differs from the fin of a fish only in degree, 
because similar causes can be traced at work in 
the development of both. With a still wider 
outlook, we have come to recognize that all things 
are connected by an interlocking chain. The uni- 
verse in all its parts has developed by successive 
stages from primeval germs, so that each part 
is related, closely or distantly, to every other 
part. We may not be able to detect all these 
different stages or degrees, but that they are there 
is a necessary part of our belief in the rationality 
of the universe. Just asa histologist can construct 
an unknown animal from a single bone, so, if 
we were wise enough, we could construct the 
world from a grain of sand. If we knew all in 
all of the flower in the crannied wall, we should 
know what God and what man is. 

This does not mean that we are obliged to give 
up using the expressions, “‘differences in degree 
and in kind’’; only it is to be remembered that 
they are not strictly accurate; they are loose and 
convenient modes of speech. It is in the main with 
the differences between objects that we are com- 
monly concerned rather than with their unity. 
Yet while we rejoice in the glorious manifoldness 
of the world, it must never blind us to the fact 
of its profound, majestic, underlying unity. 


The Growth of the Doctrine 27 


This will recommend to us as all the more 
natural, all the more inevitable, the thought of 
which we were speaking, of a line from the lowest 
atom through man, through Christ, straight up 
to God. There are those who hesitate to allow 
this because of their desire to accent the difference 
between Christ Jesus and other beings. But such 
difference is quite as strongly insisted on by those 
who welcome the continuity of this line of ascent. 
Where the former, however, would be, at first 
at least, chary in allowing the existence of connect- 
ing links between Christ and lower beings, the 
latter would reverently welcome such links. It 
nevertheless would seem, that all should agree 
in recognizing the continuity of the chain when 
we reflect that it was precisely this which was as- 
serted in the historic creeds which all respect. 
These creeds agree in maintaining both the divin- 
ity and the humanity of Christ. ‘They felt the 
difficulty of combining the two because of their 
dualistic belief in the oppositeness of divine and 
human. Either one side was merged in the other, 
or the two were tied together and asserted as one 
without explanation. As long as dualism blocked 
the way the problem was insoluble. Only when 
it is recognized that humanity is divinity in germ 
and that divinity is humanity raised to the nth 
power, does a solution become possible. We may 
disagree with the Creeds of Nicea and Chalce- 
don in their methods of explaining the unity of 


28 The Virgin Birth 


divine and human, but we fully agree with what 
they were endeavoring to assert—the likeness of 
Christ to humanitty and at one and the same time 
his difference from it. 

The Virgin Birth is, therefore tt in no way con- 
nected with the divinity of Jesus unless we regard 
that divinity as material. We may accept it or 
may reject it for a more spiritual idea of divin- 
ity, and in either case hold fast to the essential 
underlying truth of the differentness, the unique- 
ness, the majesty, the lordship of Christ, the 
eternal Son of God. We do not indeed venture 
to such a length as to say that Christ is God, for 
this would involve the inconceivable assertion that 
God Almighty was once born and died. More- 
over, the Bible never declares, as a truth to be 
believed, that Christ is God. The awed, enthu- 
siastic exclamation of ‘Thomas when he is at last 
convinced of the reality of Jesus’ resurrection, 
‘“My Lord and my God!” is the only instance 
in the New Testament where the term ‘‘God”’ is 
directly applied to Christ, and this is the momen- 
tary utterance of excited emotion rather than a 
calm statement of rational opinion. ‘The habit 
of founding doctrines solely upon Bible texts has 
been largely discontinued; but even granting them 
their legitimate authority, it is the consensus of 
different passages that constitutes this authority 
rather than isolated instances. For, as was said 

* St. John 20, 28. 


The Growth of the Doctrine 29 


by the learned and pious Provost of King’s Col- 
lege, Cambridge, Dr. Benjamin Whichcote, ‘‘No 
one institution depends upon one text of Scripture 
only. ‘That institution which has but one text for 
it has never a one.” 16 

I do not overlook the passages in the Book of 
Revelation in which Jesus is called the Alpha and 
Omega. “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning 
and the ending, saith the Lord, which is and which 
was and which is to come, the Almighty.” 17 
But the one who here calls himself Alpha and 
Omega expressly disclaims worship, professing 
himself a fellow-servant with the Seer, and bids 
him worship God.'® ‘This inconsistency is alto- 
gether consistent with the usage of the author. 
“From him logical consistency in ideas and 
images and exclusiveness among them cannot 
be demanded. As he identifies Nero with one of 
the Beasts, and then immediately, unconsciously, 
and with no sign of transition, identifies him with 
the Beast as a whole, so here the highest angel 
and the beginning of the creation of God, the first- 
born of every creature and the Prince of Heaven, 
the King of the new Kingdom and the Eternal 
Judge, pass naturally and unconsciously into one 
another. If this seems strange, it can be so only 
to one who comes expecting to find everywhere 


7° Aphorisms, 586. 
Rev. 1, 8-11. 
* Tbid., 22, 8.9.13. 


30 The Virgin Birth 


the footprints of a carefully worked-out theologi- 
cal system, such as are those of the West. Such 
a system is not natural to the Oriental mind, and 
was foreign to the earliest days of Christianity. 
Valuable as such systems are, they are an adult 
growth, and in the history of Christianity it re- 
quired several centuries and the influence of the 
West to produce them. Vision comes more nat- 
urally in the East than thought; and in a vision 
the images blend and pass into one another with- 
out condemning thereby the vision’s genuineness 
or value. 

‘The point of view of the Seer then is continu- 
ally changing. He conceives of Jesus now as the 
highest of the creatures, now as the Eternal be- 
ginning and end of all things. Our difficulty in 
comprehending this arises not only from the 
fact that to us each of these is a definite and sep- 
arate conception, while to the author such def- 
initeness and separation did not exist, but also 
from the single idea conveyed to us by the word 
‘angel’ as compared with the double idea con- 
tained in the original, ayyedkos. To the Greek 
this word meant not only one of those beings 
whom we call distinctively angels, but a messen- 
ger of any kind. To speak of Jesus as a divine 
a&yyedos then in this primary sense of messenger 
would not be so foreign to the point of view which 
regarded him as Son of God as to speak of him as 
an ‘angel.’ Here again the Oriental mind, 


The Growth of the Doctrine 31 


averse to minute distinctions, would probably 
have found no difhculty where the Western mind 
might readily find one.’’ 1° 

While then by no means refusing to allow to 
proof-text, miracle, or native physical endowment 
all the weight to which they are entitled, we may 
joyfully turn to a deeper ground for our belief 
in the divine Son of God, which we find summed 
up for us in the words of a distinguished modern 
theologian: ‘The crowning evidence of the di- 
vinity of Christ is that in yielding ourselves to 
him we find God.” ?° 


Frederic Palmer: The Drama of the Apocalypse. The 
Macmillan Co., 1903, pp. 104, 105. 

” Pres. Geo. E. Horr, D.D., Newton (Mass.) Theological In- 
stitution, Baccalaureate Sermon, June 3, 1923. 


CHAPTER III 


MIRACLES 


Those who hold a materialistic view of the 
divinity of Christ sometimes suppose that the 
objection to its acceptance by others is due to a 
refusal to recognize the element of the supernat- 
ural. Yet so far is this from being the case that 
those who hold a more spiritual view object to 
the opposite opinion because it is not supernatural 
enough. ‘They go further and consider it con- 
trary to what they must regard as God’s mode of 
action, for this they must believe to be ever ra- 
tional and self-consistent. But if the Virgin 
Birth were something wholly unique, then the Di- 
vine action would be in this instance disjointed, 
unrelated to anything done by God before or 
after. It could therefore have no meaning, and 
having no meaning could not be part of that Word’ 
of God without which nothing was made which 
was made. Its isolation would make it non-nat- 
ural rather than supernatural. If we allow dual- 
ism to come to our aid for a moment, we shall 
recognize nature, the state of things which is, 
having in it no self-directive force, inert and plas- 
tic, and alongside and above it the formative 

32 


Miracles AA 


power of personality, moulding things after its 
will. This formative power which is above the 
natural order we may call supernatural. From 
this point of view our objection to the theory 
of the uniqueness of the birth of Christ is that 
it is not supernatural enough, that it does not 
accord with the universality, the rationality, the 
majesty, of God’s mode of action. But after 
availing ourselves thus of the services of dualism 
we must reject it as a real interpreter and take 
the position that there are not two distinct realms 
but everywhere personality is dominant. We may 
indeed still use the terms ‘‘natural’’ and “‘super- 
natural,’ as we permitted ourselves to do with 
the terms “‘difference of degree’ and ‘“‘difference 
of kind,” recognizing them as loose and inexact, 
serving as handy modes of thinking but often be- 
clouding the reality. 

This consideration of the supernatural will 
help us in meeting its sister-word “miracle.” 
Those who accept the Virgin Birth regard it as a 
miracle; and they commonly assert, as we have 
said, that those who hold the opposite view do so 
because they disbelieve in miracles altogether. It 
may be well then to enter upon a somewhat ex- 
tended digression to set forth our conception of 
the miraculous and show how fundamentally in- 
terwoven with Christianity we believe it to be. 

Dualism long succeeded in imposing on Chris- 
tian thought its dictum that a miracle was some- 


34 The Virgin Birth 


thing contrary to natural law. Its voice was so 
successful in this respect that when modern 
science established the belief in the universality 
of law, this belief seemed to involve disbelief in 
Christianity because that was supposed to be tied 
to the dualistic view of miracles. Fifty years ago 
Matthew Arnold, who should have known better, 
could make the calm assertion with its air of set- 
tling the matter finally, “‘Miracles do not happen.” 
It is safe today to reverse the assertion and say, 
miracles not only have happened but are happen- 
ing. To deny the dualistic view of miracles a hun- 
dred years ago was to offer oneself as a target 
for the missiles “‘infidel’’ and ‘‘atheist.”” ‘Then 
Christian thought began cautiously to whisper 
that after all the miracles were a heavy burden 
on Christianity. “Today we have come to see in 
a miracle a material change dictated by mind. 
We are therefore affirming the entire normality 
of miracles and that a religion without them 
would be no religion. We do not believe in 
Jesus Christ because he worked miracles, but we 
could not believe in him if he had not worked 
miracles. 

In applying this thought to the interpretation 
of miracles we shall confine our consideration of 
them to those mentioned in the New Testament; 
not because we would deny that the miracles men- 
tioned elsewhere ever occurred, but because the 
former conform more plainly to our general law 


Miracles Bg 


that a miracle is a material change dictated by 
mind. 

The miracles of the New Testament may be 
divided into three classes—cases of healing, cases 
of raising the dead, and those which for lack of a 
better term we may call nature-miracles. The 
first class embraces nine-tenths of all the miracles 
narrated. The second class is mentioned in six 
narratives, three of which are manifestly of the 
same incident. It is noteworthy that in this thrice 
told case Jesus expressly asserts that ‘“‘the dam- 
sel is not dead, but sleepeth.”’ Since in early Chris- 
tian usage death was spoken of as a sleep and 
since the bystanders evidently regarded this as a 
case of genuine death, we will not dispute the 
common assumption that it was a case of death. 
There are then four cases of asserted raising of 
the dead, or if we include the resurrection of 
Jesus, five.2 The nature-miracles include such as 
feeding of the thousands, the changing of water 
into wine, the walking on the water and the 
calming of the wind and the waves, possibly the 

*St. Matt. 9, 18 f. St. Mark 5, 23f. St. Luke 8, 41. St. Luke 
7, aif. St. John 11, 43 f. Acts 9, 36f. 

21 do not include those mentioned in St. Matt. QAS 52.535 
The fact that the graves were said to have been opened at 
the crucifixion but that the dead did not rise until after Jesus’ 
resurrection, indicates that this was undoubtedly an addition 
by a later editor who wished his Master to appear as “the 
first-born of them that slept.” The story occurs in only one 
Gospel, and that not the earliest. We might, however, include 


these cases in the second class mentioned above without detri- 
ment to the explanation offered in regard to them. 


36 The Virgin Birth 


incidents narrated in the accounts of the barren 
fig tree, the money in the fish’s mouth, the unusual 
haul of fish, and the Gadarene swine. It is plain 
that a key to the understanding of the miracles 
is to be sought in those of the first class. 

It is only recently that the direct power of 
mind over matter has begun to be studied care- 
fully, and we are already discovering that that 
power is much greater than had been supposed. 
It has, of course, long been known that one’s 
beliefs and mental attitude have a profound influ- 
ence on his body. Courage and cheer are potent 
factors in overcoming illness, and morale is as 
important to an army as guns. Many a soldier 
does not discover that he is wounded until after 
the excitement of battle has passed by. A further 
stage in the power of mind over matter is reached 
in the fact that the beliefs and attitude of one 
person—or to sum it all up in a word, his per- 
sonality—may have a profound influence on the 
personality of another, and this not so much by 
argument and conviction as by impartation and 
absorption. The stronger nature gives itself to 
the weaker, which emerges from the contact with 
powers not before possessed. And—a step fur- 
ther still—these new powers are not confined to 
the mind but are operative also on the body of the 
recipient. The hypnotist says to his patient, 
“You cannot move your arm,” and he cannot. 
The devout Catholic who kneels before the shrine 


Miracles 37 


at Lourdes, convinced of the healing power of the 
Blessed Virgin, rises and throws away his crutches. 
The revivalist says to the drunkard, ‘You are 
no more an outcast. Your craving for drink is 
gone,” and behold! it is gone. 

It will be remembered that we defined a mir- 
acle as a material change dictated by mind. It 
is plain then that in this impartation of person- 
ality in which resides the power to work miracles, 
we have what we may call the law of miracle. 
Those who maintain that a miracle is an event 
contrary to natural law will of course assert 
that a miracle can have no law. But, apart 
from our necessary belief that all things must 
have a rational basis, this declaration of inde- 
pendence in severing one miracle from another 
would make them each an anomaly. It may justly 
be objected, however, that our definition does not 
exclude the use by mind of means in realizing its 
dictation, and that if means are used, every result 
of human agency becomes a miracle. Strictly 
speaking, this is true. But we may legitimately 
conform to popular usage and apply the term 
“miracle” to those instances only in which the 
agency is direct or the means are unknown. It 
will of course follow that to those who see the 
means employed in realizing the dictated end the 
event will not be, in the popular sense, miraculous, 
while to those who do not see the effecting means 
the same event will be miraculous. An eclipse is 


38 The Virgin Birth 


not miraculous to an astronomer; to the wonder- 
ing savages who watch his predictions come true 
it is a miracle. 

It is in this principle or law of the impartation 
of personality that we may find an explanation 
of the first class of miracles which we mentioned 
—the works of healing. Here as elsewhere the 
measure of what can be given is conditioned by 
the capacity to receive. The higher personality 
cannot pour itself into the lower unless the lower 
contributes all the receptivity of which it is 
capable. The first condition for reception is 
willingness; and this implies a more or less com- 
plete conviction of the ability of the expected 
influx to accomplish the desired end. This neces- 
sary receptive attitude is called by Jesus belief, 
and its presence or absence conditioned the success 
or failure of his power to work miracles. On the 
one hand he declared “‘All things are possible to 
him that believeth,’ and on the other hand he 
could do no mighty works in a certain place be- 
cause of their unbelief. We ourselves see this 
law in operation in comparatively simple cases. 
When we come into the presence of a strong 
noble nature, we are shamed out of our feebleness 
and ignoble motives and rise into high fellowship 
with it. Many cases of disease, such as nervous- 
ness, hysteria, headache, fever, abnormal appe- 
tites, divided personality, insanity, are cured com- 
pletely or partially by the uprising response in the 


Miracles 39 


patient to a strong appealing personality. These 
are as truly instances of the law of miracle as were 
in their higher degree the mighty works of Jesus. 
“The works that I do,” he declared, “‘shall ye do 
also.” We have declared previously that we could 
not believe in him if he had not worked miracles. 
Not only his divinity but even his superiority in 
any degree to us would have been disproved if 
this great common law of miracle had not been 
superlatively operative in him. 

But, it may be said, the miracles of healing 
reported of Jesus include a far greater range of 
disease than the kinds we have mentioned. ‘This 
is true, and is precisely what is to be expected 
when we compare what may be called the size of 
his personality with ours. A personality greater 
in the nth degree will accomplish works greater in 
the nth degree also. But it is interesting to note 
that his power apparently did not extend to all 
cases. [here is no record of a lacking limb re- 
placed, nor, so far as we know, of the healing of 
an advanced case of tuberculosis or cancer. His 
power had, if we may so say, both its physical and 
spiritual limits. 

But though we may trace this law through nine- 
tenths of the miracles attributed to him, yet we 
must pause, so it is thought, when we come to 
the second class of miracles mentioned—the rais- 
ing of the dead, for nobody has ever seen one 
really dead restored to life. Perhaps this de- 


40 The Virgin Birth 


mand for a modern instance is begging the ques- 
tion. At all events, we may well consider whether 
experience does not furnish data enough to enable 
us to infer as possible the operation of the law 
of miracle in this field also. We ordinarily re- 
gard death and life as wholly different, with a 
sharp line between them. But those who have 
watched much over the dying have come to ob- 
serve in many cases a certain zone or belt between 
this world and the next in which life and death 
are mingled. The dying man seems to be now in 
this present familiar world, now in a world dif- 
ferent, more or less strange to us. Sometimes he 
professes to see those already gone and to talk 
with them, both of which experiences seem entirely 
natural to him. At times he is more dead and 
at times less dead, until the time comes when we 
say he is dead. But apparently a similarly mixed 
condition continues at first on the other side of 
death as well, and there is a zone there in which 
the spirit is living in both worlds. And just as 
when near the end here he communicated with 
those there, so when near the beginning there he 
may communicate by appearance or speech with 
those here. I say this without reference to the 
phenomena of so-called spiritualism, which imply 
a somewhat different psychology, and I am ready 
to grant that the reality of apparitions of the 
dead has perhaps not been indubitably demon- 
strated. But sufficient evidence exists to justify 
the claim that the hypothesis is not unreasonable. 


Miracles 41 


There seems, however, to be a time-limit. Evi- 
dence exists, which in my opinion is trustworthy, 
that the dead have appeared to the living within 
three or four days after death. I have never 
heard evidence of appearances after that time 
which seemed trustworthy. It is as if the spirit 
required a certain time to become adjusted to its 
new conditions, and during that period was still 
to some extent resident in its former zone. 

Let it not be supposed that I am asserting these 
things as certain. We are here peering into a 
misty region where, like the half-blind man, we 
see men as trees walking. We are suggesting 
explanations which may be possible but which are 
not yet demonstrable. If, however, there is this 
zone we have described on each side of the line 
of death, it does not seem unreasonable to sup- 
pose that the efficient personality which could ar- 
rest death, such as we have seen to be operative 
in the first class of miracles, should be able in 
some cases to recall the spirit from the zone just 
beyond death. This would be to carry the opera- 
tion of the law of miracle a step beyond cases of 
healing, but it would be a step in the same 
direction. 

These considerations will throw light on the 
resurrection of Jesus. It would of course be in- 
conceivable that so wonderful and mighty a per- 
sonality could be overcome by death; he must 
have lived after it as truly as before. . The only 
question that perplexes is as to his reappearance 


42 The Virgin Birth 


to his disciples. Apart from the Gospel testi- 
mony, the line of thought we have been pursuing 
would lead us to regard his reappearance as in- 
herently probable. Using the thought to stpple- 
ment the testimony of the Gospels, we can but 
regard his reappearance as established as fully 
as any event in his career. In view of the proba- 
bility, which we have suggested, of the com- 
paratively brief space of time within which re- 
appearance after death is likely to take place, it 
seems probable that the date of his final dis- 
appearance was the third day after his death, as 
given in the third Gospel, rather than the pro- 
longed time stated vaguely in round numbers in 
the later Book of the Acts as after “forty 
days.” 8 

What became of his body is another question. 
But it is one which has for us only the interest 
of curiosity; it is in no way involved in the con- 
sideration of his reappearance. The genuineness 
of apparitions of those who have died may be 
questioned on many grounds, but in such judgment 
the disposition of their material bodies has never 
had weight. Whether the flesh and bones of Jesus 
were reanimated or not, how and when they finally 
disappeared, are matters of little interest and no 
significance. [he important thing is that he, 
Jesus, was not held by death; his spirit after 
death took the same path our spirits must take. 
This is what is asserted in the clause of the 

* Cf. St. Luke 24, 13.50 with Acts 1, 3. 


Miracles 43 
Apostles’ Creed, ‘“‘He descended into hell,’ which 


has this meaning assigned to it in the rubric at- 
tached to the Creed in the Prayer Book of the 
Episcopal Church: ‘‘Any Churches may, instead 
of the words ‘He descended into hell,’ use the 
words ‘He went into the place of departed spirits,’ 
which are considered as words of the same mean- 
ing in the Creed.’ ‘That the material body of 
Jesus rose through the clouds till it disappeared 
is not only inconceivable but it does not solve the 
problem of its final disposition. He, Jesus, was 
more than his body. It was the living Christ who 
was the inspiration of the early Church and who 
has continued to be the centre of Christianity 
ever since. ‘he fate of his body is not of the 
least importance. 

In regard to the second class of miracles then 
we may conclude that it seems probable that 
here too the law of miracle based on the impar- 
tation of personality is operative; and while this 
carries us a step beyond the preceding it is, we 
repeat, a step in the same direction. 

In regard to the third class, the so-called nature- 
miracles, we have less experience of use for point- 
ing to a possible explanation. We have, it is 
true, ever increasing instances of the conquest 
of nature by man, and it may be that some of 
these, such as radio and wireless telephony, may 
furnish the gate through which man may enter 
on a more direct control of nature. But at pres- 
ent we have little that helps us to understand some 


44 The Virgin Birth 


of these narratives, if taken at their face-value. 
Some of them, however, like the case of the bar- 
ren fig-tree, seem almost patently not authentic; 
the original event, whatever it was, has been ap- 
parently colored for the purpose of edification. 
The attempt to explain the feeding of the thou- 
sands as an acted parable of the Last Supper is 
to many as unsatisfactory as is a literal interpre- 
tation of the event. ‘The fact, however, that the 
authors narrate these miracles with entire seri- 
ousness, as matters of course, differing in no re- 
spect from other events which they regard as 
unquestioned, may lead us to respectful suspen- 
sion of judgment with reference to them. They 
may point to unexplored regions in which forces 
reside yet unknown to us. We shall always be 
cautious in afirming what cannot be. Meantime, 
what we think of these miracles is of compara- 
“tively little importance, for they are few, they 
make no new contribution to our knowledge of 
Jesus, and their position in the gospel history is 
not fundamental. If we were asked, ‘How do 
you explain such and such a one?” perhaps our 
best answer would be, “I do not know.” This 
answer, while asserting the right of suspended 
judgment, would leave untouched our belief in 
the great fundamentals of the gospel of Christ. 

So far then from objecting to the Virgin Birth 
because it involves a miracle, our objection to it 
is, aS we said, that it is not supernatural enough. 


CHAPTER IV 


THE VIRGIN BIRTH AND THE CREEDS 


While the question of the Virgin Birth con- 
cerns all thoughtful minds, it has an especial in- 
terest for those who belong to a church in which 
such confessions of faith as the Apostles’ and 
the Nicene Creeds are in use. One who must at 
all costs be honest in his profession may ask him- 
self, “Can I question the historicity of the Virgin 
Birth and still conscientiously repeat the Creeds ?” 
His answer will depend to some extent upon the 
tone of his mind. If he is legally inclined, he 
will perhaps regard the Creed as like a contract 
in law, each of whose terms must have a fixed 
meaning, which must be assented to by every 
member of the Church using the Creed. Such a 
view is, however, untenable, for it stumbles at 
the very first words, ‘‘I believe in God the Father 
Almighty.” But what is it to believe? ‘To one 
person it is hardly more than to let a statement 
pass unchallenged. To another it is to give his 

*It is noteworthy that in the longest and most complex of 
the three historic Creeds in the service of the Church—the 


Athanasian—and in the original form of the Nicene Creed, 
there is no mention of the Virgin Birth. 


45 


46 The Virgin Birth 


whole heart and soul and mind and strength to 
the truth affirmed. Is ‘‘God’’ a definite term, the 
same for every one? Does it not rather connote 
an almost infinite variety of ideas? ‘‘Father”’ 
may be a word of terror to the neglected waif of 
the streets, or it may be to the son of a good 
home a mirror of unspeakable loving-kindness. 
As soon as we have to do with creeds we enter a 
region where precision and community in exact 
understanding are impossible, for spiritual reali- 
ties are not measured by the foot or the pound. 
The more determined the endeavor to secure such 
exactness, as in the Athanasian Creed and the 
Westminster Confession, the more complete has 
been the failure to attain a bond of union. 

It is unwise then to regard a creed as a legal 
contract between an individual and the Church to 
which he belongs, or, to change the figure, as a 
central police-station which fixes authoritatively 
the meaning to be attached to its statements and 
prohibits all other meanings. To regard the 
Church’s attitude to a creed as that of a cus- 
todian of an estate, whose duty is to preserve it 
and hand it on unchanged to coming generations, 
is to degrade both the Church and the creed, 
since for this no living custodian would be needed 
but a book would do as well. Such a guardian 
is like the Israelite who tried to keep his pot of 
manna beyond the allotted time, and who found 
that it became corrupt. There is many a man who 


The Virgin Birth and the Creeds 47 


stands clutching persistently the halter from which 
the horse has long ago escaped. If a creed is to 
be more than a scholastic treatise on theology, 
if it is to be a bond of union among believers, this 
bond must be found in the central thought under- 
lying the creed rather than in its particular ex- 
pressions. The framers of the creed expressed 
their thought in the form best fitted to the un- 
derstanding of their time. But as times changed, 
this form became unintelligible, or expressive of 
an idea different from that originally intended, 
or one now seen to be not essential to that origi- 
nal thought or to be even detrimental to it. For 
example, no one now knows just what is meant by 
the phrase in the Apostles’ Creed, ‘“The com- 
munion of saints.’ Probably it originally meant 
participation in sacred things, such as the offerings 
and the sacraments; perhaps also the community 
of believers on earth with the saints and angels 
in heaven. Later ages, not understanding it, con- 
ceived it to mean the fellowship of the saints on 
earth, i.e. the Church. Scholars, however, as- 
sure us that whatever it means, this it cannot 
mean, but just what it does mean and why it was 
included in the Creed they do not know.? 

Again, there are many today who are silent 
when they come to the phrase, “I believe in the 
resurrection of the body,” for probably no one 
holds that his present body will stand up living 

*Cf. A. C. McGiffert: The Apostles’ Creed, p. 200f. 


48 The Virgin Birth 


after death. But this article was intended to be 
a confession of belief in the preservation of per- 
sonal identity. To the framers of the article, the 
idea of personal existence apart from a body was 
inconceivable, or if conceivable, pagan. There- 
fore they dressed their belief in clothes which 
seemed to them proper and essential. But while 
we hold the belief as strongly as they did, the 
clothes have become impossible for us. It is 
no diminution of belief then, it is its fulfilment, 
when we translate this article to mean the preser- 
vation of personal identity. 

“Then,” one may say, “would it not be better 
to translate the whole Creed into the language 
and thought of today, so that we may mean ex- 
actly what we say?’ Yes, undoubtedly it is de- 
sirable that each one should do this for himself. 
But the moment we regard our translation as the 
final standard for the present or the future, we 
are digging the same pit for others which our 
forefathers dug for us. For if a creed is not to 
become a fossil, it must be continually translated 
into the differing thought of each new age. In 
doing this it will of course be necessary to be 
governed by loyalty to what was the original in- 
tention of the framers of the creed. Every 
scholar or reformer has a right to point out fresh 
meanings, provided they are in the interest of the 
creed’s original intention—are larger, less con- 
tradictory, more spiritual, more indicative of the 


The Virgin Birth and the Creeds 49 


symbol’s real signification. We are not changing 
a creed when we are freeing it from its own in- 
consistencies and giving more unhampered and 
fuller life to the ideas which constituted its value. 
For that which enables the essential self of a 
thought to rise to greater completeness and ac- 
quire a larger hold on men, is helping it to be- 
come more fully its real self; and the name for 
that process is not decay but development. If 
we refuse to recognize the legitimacy of such in- 
terpretation, we condemn our Lord. For he took 
words which had a definite meaning for the 
churchmen of his day—‘righteousness,” ‘“‘king- 
dom,” ‘“‘Messiah”’—and gave them meanings 
which were wholly different. This created uncer- 
tainty and disturbance. ‘How long wilt thou 
make us to doubt? If thou be the Christ, tell us 
plainly.”” He was even charged with destroying 
religion; but he declared he was fulfilling it. The 
Epistle to the Hebrews is an elaborate attempt to 
give to the whole Jewish priestly and sacrificial 
system a meaning flatly in opposition to the popu- 
lar one and directly non-Jewish. Yet the ages 
have justified such a course as the only one possi- 
ble if the present at any stage is to be grafted on 
the past. To refuse such translation or spiritual- 
ization is to compel each generation to make a 
sharp break with the past and start housekeeping 
without any furniture. Instead of declaring that 
fixity of interpretation is of the essence of a 


50 The Virgin Birth - 


creed, it would be more accurate to say that con- 
tinual reinterpretation is essential to a creed. 
Creeds are guide-posts. Now the guide-posts do 
not determine the road, but the road determines 
the guide-posts. 

Christian faith is the same in its essence in 
every age, and to assert this unity is the object 
of a creed. But this unity is one of aim and 
spirit rather than of intellectual content. Instead, 
therefore, of dispensing with the historic creeds 
and making new ones every few years, greater 
unity is secured by preserving the original sym- 
bols with free interpretation and loyalty to their 
aim and spirit. An algebraic formula is true in 
every age because its terms are applicable under 
all conditions. So a theologic symbol—for such 
was the original name for a creed—may serve the 
important function of emphasizing unity with the 
past, provided interpretation of its terms is com- 
bined with loyalty to its spirit. This is not to 
concede that intellectual opinions in religion are 
of noimportance. They are of much importance, 
but their importance is distinctly secondary to 
rightness of spirit and aim, for this is the very 
essence of the union of the soul with God and of 
man with his fellow-believers. Above all, how- 
ever erroneous opinions may be and however con- 
trary to any given orthodoxy, they do not neces- 
sarily constitute heresy, for heresy is by no means 
the same as error. Error is the holding of an 


The Virgin Birth and the Creeds Ry 


opinion which is not true. But heresy is the hold- 
ing of such an opinion from an evil motive—some 
disinclination to recognize the truth, some unwill- 
ingness to change one’s course, some personal dis- 
like or spite towards those who hold an opposite 
opinion. For the root of heresy is self-assertion. 
Just as faith is the yielding of one’s self wholly 
to what is representative of God, so its opposite, 
heresy, is the putting of one’s preference in be- 
tween the truth and one’s self; and so, even an 
opinion in itself true may become heretical if held 
viciously. We may be in error through no fault 
of our own, but heretics we cannot be unless to 
our intellectual error we join some moral evil. 
It is for this reason that St. Paul classes heresy 
among the works of the flesh: ‘“‘Now the works 
of the flesh are manifest, which are these: adul- 
tery, uncleanness, idolatry, hatred, wrath, here- 
sies, envyings, drunkenness, and such like.’’ ° 
That is the class in which it belongs, for there is 
always a self-indulgent element in it. It is a sin 
one can never fall into who is pure of life and 
eager for the truth. Bishop Jeremy Taylor says, 
“No man is a heretic against his will... . Ifa 
man mingle not a vice with his opinion, if he be 
innocent in his life, although deceived in his doc- 
trine, his error is his misery, not his crime... . 
A wicked person in his error becomes heretic, 
when a good man in the same error shall have 
® Gal. 5, 20. 


52 The Virgin Birth 


all the rewards of faith. For whatever an ill 
man believes, if he therefore believe it because 
it serves his own ends, be his belief true or false, 
the man hath an heretical mind; for to serve his 
own ends his mind is prepared to believe a lie. 
But a good man that believes what, according to 
his light and upon the use of his moral industry, 
he thinks true, whether he hits upon the right or 
no, because he hath a mind desirous of truth and 
prepared to believe every truth, is therefore ac- 
ceptable to God; because nothing hindered him 
from it but what he could not help—his misery 
and weakness; which being imperfections merely 
natural, which God never punishes, he stands fair 
for a blessing of his morality, which God always 
accepts.” 4 

The article in the Apostles’ Creed on the Virgin 
Birth was intended, if we may trust historical in- 
vestigation, not primarily to assert the unusual- 
ness of the birth of Jesus but rather his historic 
reality. It was levelled against the Docetism 
which declared that he was not a real being but 
was human only in appearance. In opposition to 
this view the Creed asserts that he had a real date 
in history, a real birth and death, and it points 
to his humanity emerging from the grave and 
merging with divinity. One who holds these fun- 
damental truths may therefore claim the right to 
use the Creed, even if he rejects the theory of a 

“Liberty of Prophesying, Sec. 12, 8, 22. 


The Virgin Birth and the Creeds 53 


non-human birth in the case of Jesus; for it is 
unity with the spirit of a creed rather than with 
its intellectual content which conveys a right to its 
use. It is not wise to stake on a detail of history, 
confusedly stated and unverifiable, the blessings 
which come from loving worship of Christ the 
Lord, and to warn men that they cannot have the 
latter without the former. Our Lord himself 
never referred to the manner of his birth; and to 
erect into an essential of his religion something 
he never mentioned is to make Christianity more 
orthodox than Christ. 

The fact that we are wisely illogical often saves 
us from the harm in erroneous doctrines. Prob- 
ably no sternest Calvinist or Catholic ever re- 
alized fully what he professed to believe of the 
damnation of unbaptized infants. So there are 
many who hold the Virgin Birth who through 
lack of full consideration escape its pernicious 
consequences. Apart from the fact that ecclesi- 
astical authorities often make it a shibboleth of 
religion and endeavor to exclude from the Chris- 
tian ministry those who do not hold it, it is 
derogatory to the truest view of the union of the 
sexes. [his union on its physical side it declares 
to be impure. Instead of seeing in it the pure and 
lofty sacrament of love, it brands it as some- 
thing in which a divine being could have no part, 
and thereby stigmatizes an essential and God- 
ordained act as unworthy of God. The noblest 


54 The Virgin Birth 


instincts of love have indeed surmounted this per- 
nicious teaching and sanctified all aspects of 
wedded union. But this has been done, not with 
the aid of the Virgin Birth, but in spite of it. 
This degradation finds no warrant in word or act 
of Jesus. For he ever exalted fatherhood. 
‘Father’ was to Him a sacred word, the highest 
and most significant he could use in interpreting 
the relations between God and man. This he 
could not have done if there was to his mind in 
the relationship something inherently dishonor- 
ing to the highest ideal. That entire freedom 
from taint which the Virgin Birth ascribes to 
Jesus rightly, but seeks to guarantee in a manner 
different from what was in reality the case, this 
must be possible for every one born of woman: 
‘Else,’ as St. Paul in another connection says, 
“else were your children unclean, but now are 
they holy.” ® 

In what has been here said of the Virgin Birth 
we have endeavored to distinguish between its 
possibility and its historicity. Its possibility we 
have not denied; for there is at present by no 
means sufficient scientific knowledge to warrant 
us in declaring what is impossible, except with the 
qualification, ‘‘so far as we know.” As to its 
historicity we have endeavored to present judi- 
cially the evidence, so that every intelligent and 
impartial student may weigh both sides. But we 

ah COr, 7,14. 


The Virgin Birth and the Creeds 55 


must insist that it is a detail of Christian tradi- 
tion of no importance whatever to the Christian 
religion, and that an opinion either way should 
have no effect upon any man’s religious or eccle- 
siastical standing. If one is frivolous or’ godless, 
he is a genuine Pauline heretic, no matter what 
opinion of the Virgin Birth he may hold. But if 
the fatherhood of God, the divinity of Christ, 
and the glory of immortality are vital realities 
with him; if they are the steering forces of his 
life and the spring of his work; if men take 
knowledge of him that he has indeed been with 
Jesus; then we shall be unwise to attempt to si- 
lence him, no matter in what intellectual terms 
he may interpret these great realities. To ex- 
clude one who exultingly holds the divine Lord- 
ship of his dear Master Christ and his Master’s 
triumphant rising from the dead because he can- 
not explain the mode of Jesus’ birth or his res- 
urrection, is to erect barriers ourselves where 
Christ put none. The articulus stantis vel cadentis 
of the Church is not orthodoxy, important as that 
is, but holiness. To cast out a man who is holy 
because he is not orthodox, is like hunting for a 
gas-leak with an open lamp; success can only 
bring disaster. The shock to the community at 
seeing the spirit of Christ officially disowned is 
more harmful to religion than any intellectual 
errors which might spring from his teaching. The 
Protestant Episcopal Church not only bids her 


56 The Virgin Birth 


members to hold the faith but she wisely teaches 
them how to hold it. Not in unity of opinion, in 
the bond, of a common creed, or in rightness of 
belief; these may all be valuable, but yet she 
shows unto us a more excellent way. We are to 
hold the faith in unity of spirit, in the bond of 
peace, and in righteousness of life. 

Those were wise words which were uttered by 
Dr. Charles Gore, formerly Bishop of Oxford, 
in which he pleads for what he calls, “the special 
vocation of the scholar” as necessary to preserve 
the life of the Church. ‘This vocation,” he 
says, “lies in great part in purging the current 
tradition or enlarging it by perpetual recurrence 
to the divine originals. ‘Thus the real security of 
a Church, as against the common tendency to 
doctrinal deterioration, lies in giving free scope 
to this, the scholar’s gift of knowledge. And the 
requirement which this lays upon the ordinary 
members of the Church is that they should be 
ready to mortify the desire (so natural to human 
laziness) to be exempted from the moral and 
spiritual trouble involved in relearning old truths 
in a completer or purer form, and so taking their 
part in ‘testing all things and holding fast that 
which is good.’ ”’ ® 


® Address by Bishop Gore, quoted in The Churchman, March 
17, 1906, p. 411. 


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